Popular Culture Collections

Belknap Collection for the Performing Arts

The Belknap Collection for the Performing Arts was donated in 1953 by Sara Yancey Belknap, a New York librarian and an avid patron of the arts. Since then the collection has grown by acquisition as well as through donations from artists, libraries, and interested individuals. Nearly 85% of the holdings are ephemera from 19th and 20th Century America and Europe. The archives include more than 60,000 playbills, programs, posters, photographs, costume and stage designs, clippings, newsletters, theatrical scrapbooks, sheet music, recordings, prints, scripts, and advertising circulars. The collection also contains reference works, rare and large pictorial volumes, and performing arts periodicals.

Jim Liversidge Collection

The Jim Liversidge Collection was donated in 2008 by Jim Liversidge, curator of Popular Culture Collections in the Department of Special and Area Studies Collections. The Liversidge Collection represents over forty years of collecting (from JFK and Vietnam to George W. Bush and 9-11). This walk through "Baby Boom" pop culture history touches upon highlights from politics, television, cinema, theatre, sports and day-to-day current events. The collectionn consists of close to seven thousand individual pieces, including autographs, scrapbooks, photos, programs, posters, campaign buttons, sheet music, newspaper clippings, audio recordings, VHS and DVD films, artifacts and over 400 books.

Suzy Covey Comic Book Collection

The Suzy Covey Comic Book Collection directly supports the Comic Studies Program offered by the Department of English at the University of Florida, but its holdings are open to all having an interest in the field. The collection is still growing, and is useful for those interested in the history and development of sequential art formats, particularly in the United States and includes original and reprint comic books, strips, caricatures and related items. The collection holds items from every recognized "Age" of comics as well as every genre, including daily humor strips and political satire as well as superhero, funny animal, and underground comics.

The Suzy Covey Comic Book Collection includes the Penny and Sol Davidson Collection, and the Don Ault Collection.